I Think I'm Turning Japanese

Out here, kids go to school from 7 until 4, and then often go to a “juku” cram school to study for school entrance exams. Today, I asked one of my schools about possibly leaving a few minutes early once or twice a month so that I could go to a special cram school for Japanese study. The juku classes fall on Tuesdays and Fridays, and I only teach at that school about four or five times a month. I figured that since I’m always studying Japanese at school between 3 and 4 PM, it’d be nice if I could use some of the down time to study with an actual teacher. Besides, it’s not like they even know I’m there between 3 and 4--I never, ever teach after 3.

So, I mentioned to the principal that some other ALTs in town have gotten permission to leave school a little early for juku classes, hoping that he’d see the light and let me go. I was afraid to ask, since this school has always been extremely strict about me being there, even if nobody talks to me or I have no classes scheduled. The principal told me that he couldn’t answer me right then, but that he’d get back to me. A few minutes ago, he pulled me into his office with another teacher to bear the bad news that, unfortunately, it would be too much of an inconvenience to let me go a little bit early once a month.

I said that I understood and that I didn’t want to inconvenience the school in any way. I apologized for making them take the time to figure things out and thanked them for their kind understanding. I acted like a good Japanese employee should act and walked away, defeated.

In the end, I’m not upset that they aren’t letting me go. It’s their right to make me stay as long as my contract requires. A part of me wants to be upset and rant about how pointless something is or about how much I’ve been wronged, but I really don’t have the energy. Sometimes it’s easier to just accept defeat. How very Japanese of me.

That said, the American in me still wants to speak out against the drawn-out process. It would have been much easier for everyone if they just said no from the beginning, rather than making it seem like such an ordeal. While I understand well the whole “duty to your employer” angle, I still wish we could have skipped the formalities and just talked to each other without all the social distance and subservient bowing. Perhaps I’m not turning Japanese after all.

Not Even the Internet Can Avoid the Japanese Beaurocracy

Updates have been pretty rare lately, and I'm sorry about that. 3 weeks ago I went to the electronics shop to set up an appointment for broadband internet installation. I was told that since I don't have a home phone line (which is necessary for ADSL), it would take three weeks for them to come out and activate the service. My predecessor described this arduous task as "flipping a switch". Who knows--maybe it's a really big switch.



Stef set up a doctor's appointment for Mia for Wednesday the 22nd (yesterday), so I needed to call and let the internet people know that we wouldn't be there that day (they gave us a three day window, from Wednesday to Friday). When I called the English tech support line on Monday, the lady told me that I had given them the wrong address, and that I needed to fix it before they'd come out--and I'd have to wait another 3 weeks after fixing the address. I checked the paper carbon copy of the application that I had filled out, and lo and behold, I had written the address correctly. The person doing the data entry had left out the words "dai" and "ichi" in front of the building which together basically mean "number one" or "first". Never mind the fact that in my ward, Katayama, there are no other Tamai buildings. This was apparently a very serious problem. Of course, I've already received mail from the internet company at that address since filling out that application. But whether mail could be delivered or not, a missing "number one" just wouldn't do.

So, I got on the phone to fix the address that I had correctly given, but I had to call the Japanese customer service line. After waiting on hold for about 15 minutes, I gave up and decided to find a different internet service provider. That turned out to be a huge blessing in disguise--our new provider is actually about 10 bucks cheaper per month, and it's much faster. With YahooBB, we would have paid about 58 dollars a month for 12Mbps service, but since it's ADSL and we live far from the relay center, we would have been getting a 700kbps connection. Our new service, NTT, costs about 45 dollars a month and offers speeds up to 100Mbps (though 25 Mbps is actually a more realistic expectation due to various factors). In other words, we're paying less for something that's at least 35 times faster.

I'm interested to see exactly how fast we can download. If it gets up to 100Mbps, we could download 3.5 gigabytes of data in as little as 5 minutes. That would take almost a full day with the other service. Most people don't care as much about that stuff, but for a tech geek like me, that's heavenly.

Up until now, we've been borrowing our neighbor's wireless internet connection. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to connect for about 3 days now. So, until May 8th (when our service is installed), we probably won't be able to keep in touch. I was really looking forward to hearing from people on my birthday, but that's probably not going to happen. Hopefully we'll at least get the slow wireless connection up and running again. We can at least do Skype with that. I'm going to write another post or two today and post them above this one.